Russia's Medvedev grants interview to opposition paper

Russia's President Dmitry Medvedev attends a meeting with the leaders of Russia's dominant political party United Russia at a presidential residence outside Moscow, April 8, 2009.

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has given a fiercely critical publication his first Russian newspaper interview, in what the Kremlin said was a gesture of solidarity with a newspaper which has seen two of its reporters murdered in the past three years.

The interview, to be published on Wednesday, is with Novaya Gazeta, where investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya was working when she was shot dead in 2006. Another Novaya Gazeta reporter, Anastasia Baburova, was murdered in January.

"Novaya Gazeta has suffered many losses," Kremlin spokeswoman Natalya Timakova told reporters on Tuesday. "(By giving the interview) the president wanted to express his moral support to it... The decision was the president's initiative."

The newspaper admonished former President Vladimir Putin for crushing freedoms and he never give it an interview. It did however have an interview with Putin's predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, who left office in 1999.

Medvedev promised the interview after meeting the paper's editors in January and expressing condolences over the murder of Baburova, who wrote about neo-Nazi and skinhead groups and was shot just a few kilometres (miles) from the Kremlin.

Putin angered some reporters at Novaya Gazeta in 2006 by saying that Politkovskaya's work had little impact on Russian politics. Politkovskaya had sharply criticized Putin over the war in Chechnya Russian officials say her murder was ordered abroad to discredit the Kremlin.

No one has yet been convicted for the murder of Politkovskaya. In February a Moscow court acquitted a group of suspects accused by Russian prosecutors.

The Kremlin spokeswoman said the interview will touch upon civil society, the fight against corruption and reform of the judiciary, issues Medvedev has flagged as priorities.

A third reporter at Novaya Gazeta, Igor Domnikov, was killed in 2000 and a fourth, Yuri Shchekochikhin, died in 2003 from a mysterious illness. The newspaper has lampooned officials for corruption and human rights abuses.

(Editing by Jonathan Wright)